Short Takes

When her husband was notified in the fall of 1986 that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, and about $400,000 that went along with it, Marion Wiesel suggested they buy a sailboat.
“I love sailing,” she said with a smile during a recent interview.
But the couple quickly decided to use the funds for more charitable purposes, establishing the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

A man arrested for stealing from a synagogue last year was charged Tuesday with nine more counts of burglary in Brooklyn. Police said Marc Cukierwar, 31, dressed as an Orthodox Jew and stole hundreds of dollars from charity boxes at several synagogues in the Sheepshead Bay area. It is unclear if he is actually Jewish. Cukierwar was arrested Dec. 28 while trying to buy drugs, said State Sen. Carl Kruger of Sheepshead Bay.

Israeli researchers are trying to determine whether a stone tablet that supposedly dates back nearly 3,000 years is proof of Jewish claims to Jerusalem's Old City or is a fraud. The tablet, which experts from the Infrastructure Ministry's Geology Survey have authenticated, contains 10 lines written in ancient Phoenician script detailing "house repairs" on the ancient Temple in Jerusalem ordered by Jehoash, the king of Judah at the end of the ninth century BCE.

The West Bank lies half a world away from the white bread setting of "The Stepford Wives." But like the robotic Connecticut housewives of the 1975 sci-fi thriller, the female protagonists of Ruth Walk's new documentary, "The Settlers," move about in blissful oblivion.
Through saccharine smiles, the women Walk profiles profess to willfully ignore the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who surround their tiny enclave at Tel Rumeida, the ancient site of biblical Hebron and home to seven settler families.

Graves were opened and human remains exposed when a mausoleum was broken into recently at the Bayside Cemetery, a 160-year-old Jewish cemetery in Ozone Park, Queens. Cemetery officials became aware of the damage last week after the vandalism was reported by a cemetery visitor. Owned by Shaare Zedek, a Conservative congregation on the Upper West Side, the cemetery has long been in disrepair.

The West Bank lies half a world away from the white bread setting of "The Stepford Wives." But like the robotic Connecticut housewives of the 1975 sci-fi thriller, the female protagonists of Ruth Walk's new documentary, "The Settlers," move about in blissful oblivion.

Through saccharine smiles, the women Walk profiles profess to willfully ignore the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who surround their tiny enclave at Tel Rumeida, the ancient site of biblical Hebron and home to seven settler families.